Russian Ministry of Natural Resources wants a global climate model

Russsian researchers will analyze the main climatic parameters for the entire country over the last 10–20 years, including temperature, atmospheric pressure, wind speed, relative humidity and precipitation. Source: PhotoXPress

Russia’s Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment has contracted out a project for the development of a global climate matrix, which the ministry hopes to use in calculating emergency prevention costs in the future. The climate model will use data across all of Russia’s districts, in order to help officials understand the impact of climate changes on regional economies and death rates.

Next year, a
global climate matrix will be developed for the Ministry of Natural Resources
and Environment, in order to take into account an unprecedented number of
climatic factors for each district in Russia, as well as their impact on
all sectors of life. The matrix will help the ministry calculate the effects of
global warming and natural disasters, assisting the ministry in the study of
environmental influences on the death rate in Russian regions and their
economies.

Related:

A representative
at the ministry told Izvestia that climatic phenomena must be digitalized to
deal with increasingly unpredictable acts of nature.

“Essentially, we
will get threshold safety values for sharp climatic changes. It is not so much
about global warming as it is about the chance to streamline economic processes
and substantiate investments in efforts to prevent disasters. We will be able
to calculate precisely how much a region requires to effectively deal with
weeds, for example. The matrix will take almost everything into account:
diseases, death rate, droughts, fires and environmental imbalances,” the
ministry official said.

Researchers will
analyze the main climatic parameters for the entire country over the last 10–20
years, including temperature, atmospheric pressure, wind speed, relative
humidity and precipitation. They will then have to analyze the outcomes of all
the significant natural phenomena to understand how exactly climate affects the
natural environment (for instance, woodlands), the health of the population,
infrastructure facilities (buildings, roads, pipelines, etc.), power grids and
farmlands.

The research will
lay the foundation for the climate matrix, which is to be a combination of
interconnected vulnerability models for various entities in conditions of climate
fluctuations. For example, the matrix will be able to show how much death rates
for various population groups increase during a drought, make it clear how
climate changes account for the propagation of infectious and parasitic
diseases, and reveal how much more power people spend on air conditioning in
the summer.

Olga Shmeleva of
the Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution, however, is critical of the
initiative.

“This is global
climatological research, they have set themselves an almost impossible task,
because too many things must be factored in and correlated,” she said. “Some
models can be built and theoretically calculate the impact of climate on
selected indicators, but to introduce so many variables at once is impossible.”

Nevertheless, the
ministry hopes to receive a fully operational matrix that will be used by
various state agencies, from the Ministry of Economic Development to regional
healthcare ministries. A source in the Ministry of Natural Resources claims
that researchers already have the theoretical know-how to build the matrix, and
now the project only requires programmers. About 10 months will be required to
complete the matrix. The contractor will make up to 4.5 million rubles (nearly
$150,000).